Don Celender

Artist Bio:

b. 1931, Sharpsburg, Penn. d. March 3, 2005, Pittsburgh, Penn. Active St. Paul, Minnesota

Don Celender (American, 1931-2005) was an art professor and conceptual artist who championed accessibility and humor in his artistic practice as a balance to the intellectual and serious side of the field. Born in 1931 in Pittsburgh, Penn., he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 1956 and a doctorate in art history from the University of Pittsburgh in 1963. He worked briefly in the department of education at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., before taking a position at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., where he taught until receiving a cancer diagnosis in January 2005. He was known for his playful, parodic, and even outlandish work, which included absurdist proposals and surveys, including the artist book “Opinions of Working People Concerning the Arts,” 1975, and “Observations, protestations, and lamentations of museum guards throughout the world,” 1978. His work was represented by the legendary Soho, New York, art gallery OK Harris where he exhibited extensively between 1970 and 2005. [source New York Times obituary 3-10-2005].

In the early 1970s, Celender created decks of commercially printed playing cards featuring the heads of contemporary art-world personalities (artists, critics, gallerists) superimposed onto the bodies of sports figures in action poses on the front of each card along with the name of an invented sports team. On the back of each card is a detail of the person’s work. Celender’s intent was humorous, featuring critic Clement Greenberg as the Joker, for instance. Decks 1, 3, 4, and 5 are all baseball cards printed in 1971. A 1972 series was of artists as football players, 52 cards and two jokers, printed like a deck of playing cards with suits and the names of actual football teams. and a final group were holy cards with artists’s faces added to paintings of religious figures.